'I'm a happy mess'

On a hot August morning, I am driving to Brighton to meet Julie Burchill. The traffic is so bad it takes an hour to cover the last two miles. Consequently, I'm late for lunch. But when I hare into the bar, she is languidly sipping a vodka cocktail, all coquettish smiles, surprisingly slim in a black, clingy dress, her baby-soft hair looking as if she has just got out of bed. "Don't worry, babe," she pipes in her trademark Olive Oyl voice. "Did you ever find your cat?" she asks (I'd written an article about losing her). "Socks and Fluffy were really worried..."

Her best friend, who is also her housekeeper, gets up to leave us alone. "I bet Julie is a nightmare to clean up after," I whisper as Burchill orders me a glass of water. "No, she always has a tidy before I arrive. She unplugs the Hoover and makes me sit by the pool with a blue cocktail."

This is what we already know about Britain's most notorious journalist. Having made her name on the NME aged 17, she decamped to Fleet Street and made a million by the time she hit 30, then snorted most of it up her nose. She left her first husband, the novelist Tony Parsons, whom she had married aged 18, and their five-year-old son, Bobby, from whom she remains estranged. She then left her second husband, journalist Cosmo Landesman, and their son, Jack, to have a six-month lesbian affair with journalist Charlotte Raven. She left Charlotte for her brother, Daniel, a computer software engineer, 13 years Burchill's junior, whom she describes as "a hotty".

As we walk to our table, I remark on her new, svelte figure, and wonder if she might be on a diet in view of her forthcoming nuptials. But no. The reason is not vanity - "No man wants to f*** a thin girl; they're the ones who sit home by the telephone, crying" - but that she lost her mother and her best friend, Susan, to heart disease. "I've just got my life the way I want it and I thought, I've got to do something about my weight." She has dropped from a size 20 to a size 16. "I tried to get a Diane von Furstenburg dress the other day, but they only had a size six. I've got a fitting on Wednesday." I'd pictured her in a trouser suit. "What, and look like a f***ing lesbian!"

For lunch, she orders a spinach and ricotta tart, but proceeds to leave the pastry. The frugality is not down to willpower, though, of which she has none. "I've been taking Reductil. Now when I look at food I hear a voice saying, are you sure you want that?

"The reason I got fat was that I had a great boyfriend, a great life, I had no incentive to keep thin." She does, though, drink the best part of two bottles of Corsican white wine.

She met Daniel through Charlotte. "I said, 'Oooh, your brother is really horny', and she said, 'You're not meant to say that, you're a lesbian', and, bang, that was it. He was the boy for me."

She knows she is in love because nine years together felt like nine weeks, but why bother getting married? "When you get to a certain age, the word partner or boyfriend seems really juvenile."

Is she worried about growing old? "I'm 45, I'm overweight, and I've got bad teeth. But I'm not self-loathing. I don't think Dan could find someone who is more interesting than me," she says. "I'm not clingy or broody. Women never get this ... young men want lots of sex and to have a good time. If you teach fun, you've got their balls in your pocket. I hope this relationship lasts and I think it will because I respect him in a way I didn't respect my first two husbands. We started going out when he was 23 and he jokes he's too old for me now."

For five years, Burchill had a column in The Guardian in which she expressed views about everything from immigration from eastern Europe (they take jobs from the working class), to Israel (she is a Zionist) and Iraq (she was and is pro-war).

Her bÃªtes noires include Eminem, Michael Moore, Victoria Beckham ("a squawking, publicity-crazed parrot perching on Beckham's shoulder"), and sloppy liberalism. The strength of her Islamophobia is breathtaking, viz her remark that the photograph of US soldier Lynndie England with an Iraqi prisoner on the end of a leash "made a change to see a woman treating a man like a dog in a Muslim country".

Then, in January this year, she decamped to The Times. I'd heard she is paid £300,000 a year, but she says that isn't true, although the paper did double her salary. In her final Guardian column, she wrote: "If there is one issue that has made me feel less loyal to my newspaper ... it has been ... a quite striking bias against the state of Israel."

The paper's editor, Alan Rusbridger, later said: "Anyone who can refer in print to Arabs as 'camel-f***ers' should probably not be regarded as being in the same class as, say, Amos Oz or David Grossman."

She left The Guardian because, she says: "I was so aware I was unpopular. I was taken to the Commission for Racial Equality three times, and there were people whispering in corners hoping I would be taken away." Did they try to persuade her to stay? "They offered me a new sofa, so that I could watch Trisha in comfort. It was insulting really."

She admits she does indeed lie on the sofa eating chocolate, but that "I worked so hard between 17 and 35 that I love being a lazy bitch now".

But she hasn't been completely idle, having just written a book - admittedly in "a dozen afternoons after a good lunch" - for teenagers. Set in Brighton, Sugar Rush is the story of 15-year-old Kim, who has to leave her posh school and go to the local comprehensive. There she meets Maria Sweet (Sugar), and they embark on a lesbian love affair. She decided to write for teenagers because "I hardly thought the world was holding its breath for another adult novel from me", and chose a lesbian relationship because "it was more horny, more commercial".

In the book the girls take drugs, drink prodigiously and, at one point, Sugar is the subject of a roasting on the bonnet of a car in Lewes. As Rachel Johnson bemoaned in The Spectator: "Why can't it be all enchanted, like when we were young?"

Burchill insists her story is surprisingly moral, extolling the virtues of study, friendship, loving one's parents, not being a racist or a bully ...

It is a far cry, though, from the books she consumed during an adolescence of determined solitude when she sat in her bedroom masturbating. The only daughter of working-class parents (she adored her dad, Bill, who died of asbestos poisoning in 1998), she grew up in Bristol reading Mallory Towers and endless pony books ("Jill's Gymkhana, Jill Had Two Ponies ..."). I'd imagined her to be more of a Beryl the Peril type of girl.

She had a huge crush on Marc Bolan. "I drew a pentangle and promised my soul to the devil if I could meet him and then, at 17, I actually did meet him in the Roxy club, and was so drunk that when he came to say hello I told him to piss off."

She was a virgin when she married Parsons. He rather meanly said recently: "I think it's fantastic she's getting married again. It shows that true love conquers everything - even the menopause."

"How many men have you slept with?" she asks. Four. "See. It's just posh women who are slags, and then they sound off in the press about working-class women who binge drink and have abortions. I've only had sex with seven people. If I were to write another autobiography I'd call it, By The Skin of My Teeth. It's all gone much better than it should. I got away with everything. Maybe on my death bed I'll say I shouldn't have left my husbands or my children - but I doubt it."

At that moment, my husband passes outside our window (I had abandoned him to park the car). I tell her he is a Sikh. She proceeds to extol the virtues of India's (to many minds, fascist) Bharatiya Janata Party, and reveals she hates Pakistan.

We join my husband in the bar, and Julie orders another vodka cocktail. She is now decidedly squiffy. She tells my husband that, aged 12, she was in a car with a group of boys who went "Paki-bashing" and that it was far harder for her to be accepted into the bourgeois London media milieu, coming from the West Country, than it would be for him, being Indian; some might think that comment slightly racist, but it's probably true. When he tells her he doesn't know anyone, black or Asian, who was in favour of the war, she mumbles, "You're right, you're right", but insists that people in Iraq should have the right to vote. But I'm afraid I could only get her to eat her words on one subject, David Beckham - "Come on, Liz, who hasn't been seduced by a pretty face?"

On the one hand, I found her vulnerable and sweet and funny. On the other, she is a reactionary and sometimes vitriolic. But at least she sticks her neck out; most of us are far too scared.

She inhales another cocktail, sliding Dali-esque down her chair. (She told me she had got so drunk with another interviewer they went off to the Lanes, bought fist-sized pills called Red Alert, and necked them in the back of the cab. The interviewer then vomited the lot down her white Armani top.) It's now almost 5pm, and we steer her, like a tug with an ocean liner, onto the street, where we bundle her into a taxi.

A couple of days later, I received the following email: "Liz, go on, tell me - What's the worst thing I said!!" "That Matthew Broderick gives you the horn," I sent back.

"Oh God, that's AWFUL!!!" The wedding took place, almost as planned. Charlotte Raven, now married and expecting her first child, was present, as was Burchill's beloved Jack. She has had to delay the honeymoon, to Antigua, because she is just too busy. She sent me a final email:

"PS: I got married, and true to form was so over-excited I spilt champagne all down my cream satin bridal skirt BEFORE the ceremony, and trod the hem down all around before I got home! So you see I am generally A MESS, but a happy one, Julie XXX."